The cost of education has risen, relative to inflation, faster than almost any other industry. For example, in the past 45 years, tuition at major colleges, relative to the cost of sending a letter across the United States by air, has increased fivefold. It has increased 500 times relative to the cost of a cross-country phone call. Computerization has had little effect on this cost. There are some on-line courses to take, and there are some activities in the corporate-retraining arena. But nothing yet has reduced significantly the cost of college education.
While computers have generally found their way into a wide field of endeavors—with the result being nearly universal cost-reduction—the use of computers in education has some limits. Residential college education cannot be replaced entirely by impersonal, on-line courses. The social aspects of college, including learning in groups, informal teacher-student discussions, and so on, are too valuable and important. Savings, therefore, must come from elimination of redundancy. At any time, there are hundreds of courses in a given subject matter (e.g., database systems, differential equations, conversational French) that are being offered at the numerous colleges in the United States (or in the rest of the world). They differ mainly in small ways. For instance, they have similar, yet distinct, homework assignments, each requiring substantial time to design, debug, and grade.
Generating and grading homework assignments is a task that can be automated. Individualized help, group discussions, and other aspects of a course that require personal attention of an instructor cannot be easily automated. By automating those tasks that can be replicated efficiently, the course staff is free to do the tasks that cannot easily be automated, and efficiency is achieved.
Certain types of automated systems for generating and/or grading assignments exist. Electronic grading of multiple-choice problems has existed for years. However, such systems suffer from the problem that the questions are entirely generated by human effort, so, to avoid the enormous effort of creating individual questions for each student, all students are generally given the same set of questions, which raises the possibility of answer sharing.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for a system that overcomes the drawbacks of the prior art.